Where Ignorant Armies Clash

THE WIND Is RISING-H. M. Tomlinson -Atlantlc-Little, Brown ($2.50).

This is not only another eloquent book about the Battle of Britain. It is an even more eloquent book about the battle of H. M. Tomlinson, who sees that war is destroying the civilization of Britain even more effectively than the Nazis.

Author Tomlinson (The Sea and the Jungle, Gallions Reach) is a writer with a very simple mind, almost tactile vision, and a somewhat self-conscious style that is widely considered good prose. A brilliant war correspondent in 1914-17, he grew to hate war so bitterly that he wrote Mars His Idiot, one of the anti-war books that helped disarm Britons psychologically between World Wars I and II.

The twelve essays in The Wind is Rising, covering the twelve grimmest months in the bloody biennium from August 1939 to August 1941, chart the wavering course of Tomlinson's adjustment to the fact that this war is different. He writes: "I still think war an obscene outrage on the intelligence. I should not be in the least upset by what Communists call the downfall of British Imperialism. I see no reason to alter a line of what I wrote of war and peace in Mars His Idiot. . . . But this challenge by the Nazis is ultimate. . . . I know that some of our traditions and institutions may perish in resisting this subversion of the mind, but all will surely perish if no resistance is made. That is the choice we have." In this mood Tomlinson sees nothing "unreasonable, therefore, in the substitution on the shore below of endless coils of barbed wire for the children who were there last year." He likes the thought that, should invaders ever reach that beach, they will be met by "a very horrible great blast of fire from all the tussocks of grass above."

During the war's early days he reflected: "Embattled nations must get at each other in a pitchy midnight. . . . Even warfare is not what it was. Its glory is dirty. When a vast confusion is unintelligible in a prolonged and almost impenetrable darkness, it is difficult to add a touch of glory." Yet Author Tomlinson cannot escape the touch of glory at Dunkirk and the thought of Britain's air fighters: "I do not know how to write of those men who, few in number, went up on wings to avert Nazi dominion of Christendom."

Author Tomlinson has much to say about the current bad health of democratic society and the changes which Britain is waiting for the end of the war to bring. He finds from conversations with the soldiers that many of them are of the same mind, and he lends a ready ear to their bitter indictment of "the blunders of their fathers" -as if every generation did not pay for the blunders of its fathers by perpetrating new blunders on its children. But the gentle Tomlinson mind is encased in a hard head. He cannot quite rid himself of a pessimism that comes from knowing too much human history -an uneasy suspicion that when the dust has subsided, the groans have died away and radiant future has dimmed into present reality, the same old team will be found hauling the same wagon up the same hill. Only the faces on the driver's seat will have changed.

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